Dark Side of Kundalini Meditation Without Proper Guidance of a Master

Those disciplined enough to practice regularly are rewarded with increased control over the brainwaves known as alpha rhythms, which leads to better focus and may help ease pain.

In addition to calming the mind and body, meditation can also reduce the markers of stress in people with anxiety disorders.

Rigorous studies have backed health claims such as these to convince therapists, physicians, and corporate gurus to embrace meditation’s potential.

What contemporary and ancient meditators have always known, however, is that the practice is not all peace, love, and blissful glimpses of unreality.

Sitting zazen, gazing at their third eye, a person can encounter extremely unpleasant emotions and physical or mental disturbances.

Zen Buddhism has a word for the warped perceptions that can arise during meditation: makyo, which combines the Japanese words for “devil” and “objective world.”

However, this demanding and sometimes intensely distressing side of meditation is rarely mentioned in scientific literature.

Brown University researchers interviewed 60 Western selt-taught meditation practitioners who had all experienced challenging issues during their practice.

The researchers identified 59 kinds of unexpected or unwanted experiences, which they classified into seven domains: cognitive, perceptual, affective (related to moods), somatic, conative (related to motivation), sense of self, and social.

Among the experiences described to them were feelings of anxiety and fear, involuntary twitching, insomnia, a sense of complete detachment from one’s emotions, hypersensitivity to light or sound, distortion in time and space, nausea, hallucinations, irritability, and the re-experiencing of past traumas.

I cannot stress on the need to take guidance from a trained meditation master such as our SKY Yoga master for kundalini meditation.

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